I heard a noise outside the door, I walked to it, opened the door and there was the newspaper, confused I started to read it… (Click on the image to open a large version) …I woke up sweating from the nightmare, I was sitting on my couch and I immersed myself in my beloved reality. Some years the Christmas reality is happier than the others, this year for me some sadness is in the air filling everything with the emptiness left by the people I loved and are no more with me. But still all is real and I will never change it with a fake safe zone. I love reality because I know I can rationally deal with it and I can follow some little Christmas rituals, as setup a family traditional stone carved Nativity, to still feel the presence of the persons who gave me my life and helped me to become who I’m today. Christmas is the moment to forget the sadness and get ready to reborn being in charge of our own life. It is the moment to find the joy in everything around us and start planning the future with the blessing […]

Thanksgiving, a holiday I learned to celebrate. Thanksgiving is not an Italian tradition so I grew up without it. Thanksgiving is one of my preferred holidays. Every year, also when I’m in Italy, I celebrate it. I dedicate a day to think about the blessings I had in my life, I try to quit my complaining and enjoy at the fullest what I have. Today I was looking thru my parents belongings and I found a typewriter, so I celebrated thanksgiving playing with it. I let the images speak. And here the letter I wrote to remember what I’m thankful for.

In the last days I’m exploring an analogue past and thinking about the digital present. A lot of water passed under the bridge since my last blog post. My father passed away, my sabbatical I took to take care of him is going to end soon and at the moment I’m putting some order in my home getting ready to sell it and move on with my life. I come from a family were we used to keep everything and for sure a lot of pictures. Opening boxes and drawers I found the photographic archive of the family, the oldest one consisted in a lot of prints, starting from the beginning of 1900, the newest one, mostly created by me consists in CSs, DVDs and hard disks. Guess what? The oldest archive is accessible without any tools but my eyes and a source of light, the newest one requires a ton of tools and it is still accessible thanks only to the redundancy I applied when I created it, using different media to store my images, but the CDs and DVDs are almost all unreadable now. Vint Cref, one of the Internet fathers and Google VP, warned us about […]

Digital or Film? Fuji Acros Digital on a XPro-2 compared to Fuji Acros 100 Film on Hasselblad 6×6… who will be the winner? Few weeks ago I did a non scientific comparison between black and white digital and film, using my beloved Fuji XPro-2 and a Pentax 67 with Ilford FP4. The article got a lot of interest and was also published on Fuji X Passion magazine. I decided to improve the test and use Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 film, instead of Ilford FP4 and Hasselblad instead of Pentax. The use of actual Acros film instead of Ilford is obvious and needed for a less casual comparison. Hasselblad instead of Pentax is because I suspected some lack of sharpness was caused by the lenses, and since I have used Hasselblad all my life and I’m sure were the best analogue medium format camera and optics, I simply wanted to eliminate every variable related to the lens. As I said before: I know that, scanning the negative, part of the process is still digital so is not perfect I do not intend to give all the answers I did this just for fun and to understand myself a little better […]

Fuji X Passion magazine featured, in the February 2018 issue, my article about the comparison between film photography with Ilford FP4 on a Pentax 67 and digital Acros simulation on Fuji XPro-2. It is always great to be published in a beautiful magazine with other extremely talented photographers. In the meantime I just developed a roll of Fuji Acros taken with my Hasselblad 500C/M and the 80mm f2.8. More later…

Is Black and white better with digital or film? I compared the Fuji Acros film simulation on my XPro-2 with an Ilford FP4 film on my Pentax 67. Lately I had the time to scan old negatives and I was pretty impressed by the quality and quantity of information available on film, so I decided to use film again, particularly for the PhoenixPhotoProject. The quality of the images created was pretty impressive so I decided to try some film in medium format. I used to work with Hasselblad but I decided to get a used Pentax 67 and have some fun with it. Next time a Pentax vs Hasselblad comaparision! I took some pictures on the snow in a sunny day. The dynamic range a the quality of the tones were great and I started to have the feeling that film can be better than digital sometime. I decided to do a simple non scientific comparison and take the same pictures with the XPro-2, in RAW and jpg with the Acros simulation, and with the Pentax 67 with a roll of Ilford FP4. The choice of a medium format film, compared to an APS-C digital is very simple, 24 MegaPixel […]

What is the value you give to a photograph? With the PhoenixPhotoProject #1 you are free to choose! Since its invention photography had been defined and valued in many different ways. With the PhoenixPhotoProject #1, “Free to Choose”, you can decide by yourself what value you give to photography. For Niepce, Talbot and Daguerre, the men we consider the inventors of the photographic process, photography was a chemical and mechanical way to reproduce reality. Nothing more than that and we know how, for long time, thanks to them and their definitions, it was so difficult to make photography accepted as art by the most. If this is the value you give to photography you will find in the box a great mechanical tool to reproduce the reality. The camera is a Pentax Spotmatic SP, one of the greatest mechanical cameras produced in the 1960s, very simple and without any automatism, only an internal exposure meter. The camera is completed by a SMC Takumar 55mm 1.8 – a great camera/lens combo! I found the camera on E-Bay and I bought it attracted by the engraving on the pentaprism: SPAIN 51862335. This camera has a story and for […]

The end of the year is always a time to do a balance of the time passed and make new resolutions for the new year. At least it is for me. The 2017 was a peculiar year. I took a sabbatical from my work, I had the option to put myself in a situation where I had to work 16 hours a day to make a sufficient gross to have, after the italian 85% taxes (35% income, 22% V.A.T. and 27.7% mandatory state managed retirement plan) enough to pay for someone taking care of my 91 years old father, or I could just do it personally and avoid to work 85% of my time for the government. The choice was a no-brainer: I took time for myself and gave back the care I received all my life. Professionally I consider this a great year. With the few time I had for myself I managed to write some books with very good reviews and realize some personal projects. To be far from the pressure of the profession I reignited my love for photography and had the time to think and develop new ideas. January started with a beautiful review […]

Every year for Christmas I dedicated time and efforts to create a Christmas image. Usually a still life with plenty of symbolic contents and often references to the year main events. If you are curious to check them, last year I posted on my blog all the images I made in the last 20 years. This year I kept it very simple, with a winter picture I took few days ago with a Pentax 67 with a 45mm and an Ilford FP4 film. A landscape, less then a mile far from my Italian home. I’m in a kind of sabbatical period, staying at my 91 years old father home taking care of him, and I dedicate myself to photographic personal research and books writing when I have the time. Obviously he is my priority and in December I simply had not the option to subtract time from him to create a Christmas still life. Mentally, staying far from the professional duties, I also started to look for simplicity and film photography is part of this research for a simple way to photograph, far from hours of retouch and the computer. A slow method, perfect for the rhythm of life I […]

Wausau, it’s a small town in Wisconsin, in the middle of a beautiful country where the hills are spotted with colorful barns immersed in cultivated fields. Few people in the western world know that in the Wausau area, one of the best species of ginseng is produced. This ginseng is appreciated all over the world and especially in Asia, the largest export market for Wisconsin Ginseng. In 2010 I had the privilege to photograph the cultivation process of the ginseng and portray most of the farmers associated to the Ginseng Board of Wisconsin. For the first International Wisconsin Ginseng Festival I was invited to do an exhibit of the images taken in 2010, part of the book “Wisconsin Ginseng”, and I had the opportunity to take the pictures of the Festival and the correlated events. The festival was great and perfectly organized, the people at the Ginseng Board of Wisconsin and Lori McGehee from Millennium Marketing did a perfect job. A lot of people attended to enjoy the ginseng products offered at the booths and the live performers on the stage. There were meany correlated events, a 5k run, visits to the farms […]